Streamified Blog

A Stream By Any Other Name

When we first settled on the name “Streamified,” many months ago, it was the result of much discussion between us and a number of posters on my Google+ page. We wanted to capture the many different personal and interesting things around the web as “streams” within a mobile application. Still, it begged the question: what exactly is a “stream,” in this sense?

We’ve seen much talk of timelines, feeds, walls, columns, and other vertically-scrolling content in the social networking world. Our goal in building Streamified was to package each of these multi-faceted sources of content in a pleasant and unified way, enabling us to create a diverse yet easy-to-navigate social networking experience for the user. However, we also wanted to go a couple steps further. This is why we have built in features for blogs and, in the future, will be able to support other streams like Pinterest and Tumblr.

Each stream has its own unique source, be it a Twitter account, a blog, or, eventually, Tumblr. We decided to separate streams because it was the easiest way to understand where the posts were coming from, without cluttering the screen with too many streams. As a result of this, in Streamified, a single Twitter account would create a single stream, and two separate Twitter accounts would be represented by two streams. Similarly, a Facebook account would create a single stream. Of course, we wanted to allow users to keep track of @mentions, Facebook pages, and so on as well - so we decided to include these as a part of the stream they belonged to. Some can be posted to (like Facebook Pages), while others exist only to pull in more data (like Twitter @mentions).

We also added the capacity to view all streams together, regardless of source, sorted chronologically (the leftmost stream in the below screenshot):

Of course, streams like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn enable you to share new content (compose a post) as well as read other posts (the stream itself). These streams are therefore considered “read-write.” On the other hand, blogs are what we call “read-only”: you can only read the content they provide. Likewise, because of the current technical restrictions imposed by Google+ (and, in the future, Pinterest, Instagram and other such services), we can only allow you to view content from these sources for now. As these services open up further (which we entirely expect them to do), we will add support for additional features for these streams.

For now, though, Streamified aims to be a unified experience in every way it can, a central hub for your social and content-discovery/sharing needs.

Zane Claes is the founder and programmer at Streamified; he can be reached at Zane@Streamifed.com. Justine Dolorfino, Streamified’s social media marketing consultant, contributed to this post. She can be reached at Justine@Streamified.com.